Gender Generalizations

One thing that quickly became obvious during my experience writing a novel with Big Mike was the fact that he made an awful lot of “gender generalizations”. Of course I’m not blaming him for that, I’m sure we’ve all done it at least a time or two, males and females alike. Part of the differences seem to be geographical, and some related to personal experience.

For some reason, it seems us women out here in the West are a bit more self-sufficient, though. We live by the code “git ‘er done” and we’re not afraid to get our hands dirty.

I’ve got a couple examples to illustrate my point about generalizations.

For instance, when we were writing Veil of Deception, Big Mike came up with a scene whereby the hero would take the heroine fishing and used the premise that the heroine had no experience in the sport. Now Veil of Deception takes place in a fictional lake community in Virginia. The heroine had lived in this community for a decade longer than the hero and had a boat dock on her property. There was just no way I could write a scene where the heroine was ignorant of fishing. What was she doing living all these years on the lake with a boat dock if she didn’t know how, or didn’t like, to fish?

According to Big Mike, in the real lake community where he lives, there are no single women who fish. Having just spent the summer going out on the lake in a boat with some friends of mine, baiting my own hook with night crawlers I dug out of a container, and catching trout on every trip (my husband has no interest), this just didn’t make sense to me. However, Big Mike was just using his own experience in his own locale to draw a picture of the heroine as he saw her. In the end we compromised and I agreed that maybe the heroine just hadn’t been fishing for stripers before.

Another time, Big Mike and I were chatting with some of our fellow authors in a Yahoo group and he happened to post that there was at least one thing women needed a man for: to kill spiders. I wasn’t the only one who immediately responded by saying if I were afraid of spiders, I’d never get able to get out of bed in the morning! Although I keep a clean house, I’ve got more spiders living in my mountain home year round than I have pine trees in my yard. And honestly, my husband is way more afraid of them than I am. My philosophy is “live and let live”. As long as I don’t see a brown recluse or black widow, I let the critters cohabitate and catch all the other bugs.

But again, this was a gender generalization because Big Mike’s wife is afraid of spiders.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think females suffer from this affliction quite as much as males. After all, if a man cooks dinner and cleans the house and writes romantic love scenes, we tend to say “Ah! How sweet! What a great guy!”. However, if a woman works on her own vehicle, fishes and hunts, and uses power tools, too often she’s seen as less than feminine, and it’s a negative trait.

In fact, if you read the comment Big Mike made in response to a comment from Mindy and I about “The Rear View” he states that he thinks we’re both just tomboys and anomalies in the world of the female. Naw, Big Mike, it’s just that we’re western women and we know how to “git ‘er done”!

I think we’re starting to close the gap, ladies, but we’ve still got a long way to go.

Candace Morehouse
www.candacemorehouse.com